Tag: council

Councils found outsourcing a burden in 2015

ukflagLocal authorities in the UK  are starting to find that the outsourcing contracts they signed are saddling them with more costs than they predicted.

Outsourcing was being touted as a way to save money, but it is starting to look like the councils are having to scale down outsourcing operations or abandon them completely. The current belief is now that a move to outsource can be a false economy. Councils are beginning to realise they are quite adept at making savings themselves.

This year Cornwall Council was awarded the right to divorce its outsourcing contract with BT. The council signed a 10-year £160m contract with BT two years ago,. However Cornwall was far from happy and wanted out. So BT sued to keep it in.

The eventual contract with BT was a slimmed down version of the original deal proposed in 2012, which was overturned after councillors put forward a no-confidence vote to the leader of Cornwall Council over the plans.

It was not the only one which is unhappy with its outsourcing contract. Earlier this month, Somerset voted to terminate its 10-year SouthWest One deal with IBM a year early, due to a report finding it had become “increasingly unaffordable”.

Now it seems that other councils are getting less keen about being saddled with outsourcing contracts. Dorset County Council has rejected plans to outsource its IT services, as it was unlikely to be sufficiently flexible in the future.

Looking at the numbers the council decided that it would not get value for money.

This means that outsourcing sales teams hoping to interest councils in big contracts next year will find it a tough sell.

Council websites perform below par

SheffieldSix out of 10 UK council websites are failing to perform, according to a survey by netEvidence.

The company assessed the speed websites opened for 227 councils during September.

And 64 percent of councils failed to open in half a second. One unnamed London borough council took over 30 seconds to open – that’s 700 times slower than Sheffield Council which opened on average in 0.04 seconds.

Richard Thomas, the CEO of netEvidence, said that UK councillors and officers don’t have any notion about how their online services are performing because many have outsourced important parts of their IT.

The survey said that of English County Councils, North Yorkshire was the fastest at 0.137 seconds. Hillingdon was the fastest London Borough at 0.271 seconds, while East Renfrewshire was the fastest Scottish council at 0.073 seconds..